Another Flippant Reflection

I am getting tired. These long days are starting to take their toll, and there's only so much that the mind, heart and body can take in....Yet I try to keep finding a bit more space for 'one more thing' knowing that this is a time limited opportunity.

One of the highlights of the day was going to a "Voices of Indigenous Youth" panel this morning. One of the young women from Albuquerque, NM, spoke about the fluidity of her identity as an indigenous young women. She spoke about the pressure from both the Native community to "be more native" and from the wider society to be less native. She spoke of how a new generation of indigenous young people just want to be themselves. She's 28 and trying to figure out who she is without turning her back on her heritage or on how she decides to live it out.

This theme has permeated the entire Parliament - how does one live out one's faith/cultural identity in this world. As dear Bob Dylan said, the times they are a changing, and what worked for a past generation does not necessarily work for a new generation. At the same time, there seems to be a great need to remember all that has gone before us as we try to figure out how to move into the future - individually and collectively. It is fascinating to see how the world's faith are trying to addresss the identity issues and how individual people within those traditions are trying to do the same.

Hanging around with this indigenous crowd over the past few days also brought home another very sad realization. I guess sometimes one needs to travel 8,000 miles to discover one's own backyard. While here I have learned much about the so-called Indian Schools that were set up throught the US and Cananda by the Christians and Catholics to systematically dismantle Native culture and language. Many other atrocities happened at the schools as well. One presenter asked us to imagine the following and I invite you to do the same. Imagine that people came into Rochester tomorrow. They rounded up all of the Catholics, let's say, or people with some specific identifiable characteristic - but let's stick with Catholicism. They took the children from the parents - from ages 6 - 14 - and sent them off to schools - sometimes up to 400 miles away. They told the parents they were sinners, people without souls and if they didn't comply that their children would die from punishment. As for the children, they told them never to speak their native language again, never to do their heathen ceremonies, never to associate with people who looked or acted like them. They were taught that what they were was bad in God's sight and that they needed to be and act another way. They taught them a new language, gave them new clothes, taught them 'proper' ways of being in the world. They taught them proper subjects like math and reading and history. They would routinely beat them and often would sexually abuse them.

Now imagine the silence in the villages when all the children were taken away....

Now imagine that the boarding school children grew up apart from their parents. Some returned home, but many did not. Two and maybe three generations passed.

After so much time, how many of those Catholics in exile would be able to read the Bible, remember the mass or worship rituals, would remember the stories of the saints or the many other things that make Catholicism the faith that it is? How many would have positive self-esteem? What other problems would develop under such conditions?

This meditation gave me just a small taste of the impact of colonization (which really cannot be separated from Christianity) on native peoples - and especially those on whose land I now call home. The history of Rochester is no different from the history anywhere else. This week has been deeply moving for me to consider such stories in a new way. It leaves me wondering a lot as I venture home....

I also attended a session on human trafficking. Heavy. I went in part because I have 14 year old children and so many of the humans who are trafficked for sex, labor or other reasons are about that age. Another huge topic that requires our attention, concern and action - but I aint gonna get into that right now.

We just got back from a night out with Marcus Cumrow and his wife Rachel. Marcus and Rachel live in Melbourne and are friends of our friends Ched Myers and Elaine Enns in LA. Ched said, "You two gotta get together..." Marcus works at a place called the Urban Seed - a very cool community, outreach and faith experience wrapped into one here in Melbourne. Anyway, we had a wonderful evening just being in someone's home, sharing stories, talking about Aussie/US culture and just hanging out...It was a nice break from the conference schedule.

It's been a long day (again) and we need some sleep. Going to bed with the last day of the conference ahead of us....